Category: Society

It happened by accident. I was on the Eurostar from Brussels and because I was really busy and trying to get a lot of work done, I was really annoyed that the guy behind me, who I couldn’t see, was yelling into his mobile phone. After a few minutes, though, I realised that what the guy was saying was actually quite interesting. I know it seems wrong to take advantage of another’s tragedy, but the story that was unfolding from the seat behind me had everything: excitement, suspense, drama and a little humour to. For a moment I thought idly that it was saving me the trouble of reading a novel and that gave me an idea – I started to listen to what he was saying, précis it and then post and anonymised version out on twitter. I did this every 10 or 15 minutes and in entirely unpredicted way it turned into a compelling read!

That evening I was genuinely surprised to get messages from people, not just in the UK, asking me what had happened at the end of the story. I had to explain to them I didn’t know because I’ve been telling the truth: I had actually been reporting what was going on in the seat behind me on the train and when the train got to London that was the end of the story!

So why was it compelling? Because it was real: he didn’t know that I was eavesdropping and (since we know that truth is stranger than fiction) most people reading knew that there was a real person behind it. So-called reality TV isn’t real at all: The Apprentice, I’m a Celebrity, those nauseating cooking shows, they are all a kind of theatre: the “contestants” know that they are being filmed and they are playing a game to “win”. That’s why the shows are so uninteresting (I know that some of my friends really like The Apprentice, so I’m sorry!).

By the way, for posterity, here is the story…

Fascinating. On the Eurostar. Guy behind me in national sales manager for a company that makes “palletisers” (??) he is arguing on phone… #

I think one of his key customers has been approached by sales manager from another country, he’s calling colleagues to find out truth… #

This is really exciting, seems that the rival sales manager lied about what the customer said! Your man is angry, but can’t go to boss yet! #

Nailbiting. He may not be able to attend the meeting with customer on Tuesday – if he is outflanked this way it will be curtains. #

I’m going to cry if he doesn’t get to Tuesday meeting. Come on! Who knows more about the fruit for goodness sake. Boss is going to call back #

No! He’s going with the high-risk strategy – he’s going to send his own new quote back to customer to get him to sign before Tuesday! #

No, no, no, we’re almost at St.Pancras, I don’t want to be left hanging! He was just talking to someone new, a colleague, about the gamble! #

Nooooooooooo! We’re getting off the train, now we’ll never know (except I’ve set a google alert because I know company names) #

See my point! As tweets it worked, but as a conventional narrative it doesn’t. William Heath just start another story from his train and asked for a hashtag, so I suggested #realitytw as the twitterati’s alternative to reality TV!

[Dave Birch] So I watched the movie Agora on a plane, and it really annoyed me. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s set in 4th century Alexandria and it’s about Hypatia, She was a famous philosopher, murdered by a Christian mob. In the movie she is a pagan, although no-one knows whether this is true or not and she may even have been Christian herself.

The Christian monks stripped her naked and dragged her through the streets to the newly Christianised Caesareum church, where she was brutally killed. Some reports suggest she was flayed with ostraca (pot shards) and set ablaze while still alive, though other accounts suggest those actions happened after her death:

Whew! Those Christians, huh? Anyway, I was curious about the story, and a cursory google reveals that it contains numerous errors (such as the fact that one of the key characters, a bishop, actually died two years before the events depicted). One comment on a movie site I saw pointed out that Hypatia was an older woman when these events took place and that she should have been played by Hellen Mirren instead of Rachel Weiss.

I suppose the movie did at least get me to go and find out more about her and the central battle between the religious (Bishop Cyril) and secular (Prefect Orestes) with, as usual, the Jews caught in the middle (although to be fair, the Bishop appeared to hate other Christians as much as he hated the Jews).

Orestes and Cyril soon came into conflict over Cyril’s hard-line actions against smaller Christian factions like the Novatians and his violence against Alexandria’s large Jewish community.

This bit appear to be true: Psycho Cyril really did start a pogrom against the Jews, driving them out of Alexandria in 415 (Jews were an eighth of the population of Egypt at the time and Alexandria had the largest community) and he also killed Orestes.

[Dave Birch] Here’s a story about identity, just to show you how identity infrastructure works in the “real world” and how we aren’t wise to use what is alarmingly known as common sense in order to import this infrastructure across the virtual world boundary into our online future.

My son and I were out in the car one evening and we decided that since we had the lounge to ourselves that evening that we’d watch a movie together. Normally, we either buying movies through Apple TV, rummage around in the badly organised pile of DVDs in the living room, or go on Pirate Bay if we can’t find what we want through the preceding two mechanisms. But since we were out and about, we thought we go to Blockbuster. They were having a special offer whereby you could rent three DVDs for £10 for the weekend, so we decided to take advantage of it. After having spent the obligatory half an hour wandering aimlessly around the store and arguing about every single potential movie choice, we settled land on DVDs. When we got to the counter I realised that I’d forgotten my wallet but luckily we scraped up £10 between us in cash.

The actual Blockbuster video card that I was given when I opened the account, something like 15 or 20 years ago, has been long lost. For the last several years, on the odd occasion when we ventured in for a DVD, I’ve just given my surname and address and then paid using a credit card in that same name. This has served as adequate identification infrastructure for tens, if not hundreds, of visits. But this time I didn’t have my wallet, so when a guy asked me for my card and told him that I didn’t know where it was, he then asked for a credit card in the usual fashion and I told him that we didn’t have one of those either. So he said we couldn’t rent the DVDs. I was a bit annoyed because I couldn’t be bothered to drive all the way home, so I was just going to give up. But then the guy said have you got anything in the car that could be identification, like an insurer’s document or something, or even a letter addressed to you from someone official? I frankly doubted that I did, my son grasped at the straw and we went back to the car. Just as I’d imagined, there were no identification documents of any kind. They’re in the back of the car were half a dozen copies of the Digital Identity Reader 2010, the indispensable volume for all concerned with the topic of identity.

Over my son’s protestations, I went back into the shop with a copy of my book. I showed it to the guy and said “there you go, that’s me”. “Hold on”, he said, “have you got something with a picture on it, or is there a picture of you in the book?” I was forced to admit I didn’t, and there wasn’t. But son to the rescue with his raised-on-the-inter-web sensibilities. He held out an iPhone, and said “just googled him”. Fortunately under that search term, under Google images, the third picture along was me. We had our DVDs.